


Second Glance

by playwithdinos



Series: First Glance [2]
Category: Dragon Age: Inquisition
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, F/M, No Trespasser Spoilers, Not Trespasser Compliant
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-10-12
Updated: 2015-10-12
Packaged: 2018-04-26 03:28:39
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,304
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4988407
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/playwithdinos/pseuds/playwithdinos
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>
  <i>The frozen demon shatters, and as it crumbles into a wispy dust that blows away in the wind, there is a familiar face on the other side, breathless and wide-eyed as she is.<br/>Of all things this day, it is the sight of Solas standing there, as unchanged as he remains in her memory, that makes her freeze in her tracks.</i>
</p>
<p>Sequel to <i>Dalish at First Glance</i>. AU where the first Dalish clan Solas meets is Lavellan.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Second Glance

Aevalle thinks she’s beginning to get a hold on this—this stern human woman and her alternating fury and begrudging pity, the pain in her hand that _will not stop_ , the demons falling from the sky that’s been torn asunder, ripped open like an animal for gutting, entrails exposed and steaming on a cold, rainy day in the Free Marches.

Not as cold as it is here, she thinks, and she wishes she could put her borrowed daggers aside long enough to blow on her hands—especially her left, uncovered still, her fingertips numb even through the searing heat of a fever-pain in her palm. There is a sheen of sweat on her brow, and she misses the vestiges of the disguise she’d worn to cover her ears, pretending to be a scout for some noble attending the conclave.

She will never say it again, but she is grateful for the boots. Her toes are cold even with their protection.

Cassandra cleans the tip of her sword in the snow with a disgusted noise, and there’s something so familiar about the motion that Aevalle sees Emren instead, clad in stolen and ill-fitting Templar armour, complaining about how cold the metal of the helm was on his ears. Veris berating him, looking stuffy and ridiculous in Circle Mage garb, the only one of them not bothering to hide his ears. The Temple of Sacred Ashes loomed in the distance, silhouetted by the sun— _rising or falling she can’t even remember_ —and her closest friends were alive, then, and she was warm with laughter even as she berated them.

Cassandra looks at her peculiarly, and the memory is gone. Aevalle’s stomach rolls with regret, sorrow, and such a strong feeling of _illness_ that she’s sure she’ll fall to her knees in the snow and—retch or sob, she can’t tell. Either one is building up in her gut, and she’s afraid she won’t be able to stop if it starts.

“The others are just ahead,” Cassandra says, tactfully, instead of anything else, and Aevalle has never been more grateful for a shemlen’s discretion in her life.

They climb the uneven stone path together—with haste, with an urgency that’s roaring in Aevalle’s ears, the sound of demons and some other unearthly thing crackling in the air. The back of her neck and the shaven side of her head prickles, the _thing_ on her hand pulses so hard and fast that she clenches her fist and bites the inside of her lip to keep herself from crying out. She tastes the copper tang of blood, and her stomach rolls again, but her steps do not falter.

At the top of the hill, there is a hole in the sky—smaller than the rift itself, but it is sickly green and pulsing, and it makes a fever-chill wrack her exhausted limbs in a shuddering wave. She barely hears Cassandra’s shout, and no matter how she wants to hesitate in the face of this _thing_ pouring demons into the snow, she has to follow, has to move forward and join the fight.

The battle is a flurry, and her movements feel sluggish and restrained—she wishes she had found a bow instead, to feel safer firing from a distance, but here she is, bright and wary, and there is a mage cornered by a rage demon so she leaps, knives raised, and she drives them into the creature’s back.

Its flames lick at her hands, and her chilled fingertips are so cold that the heat feels like a searing pain but she grits her teeth through it, drives the knives down _harder_ , and the demon howls and writhes beneath her, unable to reach for the quarry it seeks.

Then something cold spreads from the demon’s front, ice crackling all along its body until its fire is extinguished, and Aevalle leaps back in surprise, drawing her daggers from its back just as it becomes fully encased.

It shatters, and as it crumbles into a wispy dust that blows away in the wind, there is a familiar face on the other side, breathless and wide-eyed as she is.

Of all things this day, it is the sight of Solas standing there, as unchanged as he remains in her memory, that makes her freeze in her tracks.

She almost _says_ his name, then, almost blurts it with her heated breath into the cold air through her chapped lips, but he blinks again and surges forward, taking her wrist in his hand so swiftly that she drops her weapons.

“Quickly,” she shouts, “before more come through!”

His touch is urgent, but gentle. She twists with him as he turns, raising her open palm to the rift in the air, and there is a split second where she feels her shoulder shoved up against him, feels the heat of his body and the still-familiar shimmer of his barrier enveloping her. She can smell him, for a single moment, and he _still_ smells like elfroot and blood lotus, a little like the balm she’d given him all those years ago, and underneath the smell of battle and grime and sweat there’s something richer, something with an earthy musk she can’t quite place. He smells like the Fade—the crackle in the air before a thunderstorm, the nettle tea her mother used to make—and she _remembers_ that about him, remembers his anger exposed in the sunlight pouring through the ceiling in an ancient temple, his laughter in her memory so stark against the death that has followed her since she woke.

She remembers kissing him, with the kind of brazen courage that only comes with a broken limb and jumping on the back of an ancient horror.

_Seventeen summers_ , she remembers, and is so embarrassed that her whole body feels warm with the shame of it.

Then there is the surge of something within her palm reaching out to the broken thing in the sky, and she has little time or thought for anything else.

The rift closes, and he drops her hand. He gives no indication of what she is supposed to do, how he has found her here, how he _knew_ that would work. She tries to look for it in his eyes but finds him inscrutable, his expression forced into the kind of friendliness extended to strangers.

 

She finds Solas again in Haven—or more accurately he finds her, hiding behind a little hut, her knees brought up to her chest as she surveys the goings on in the village below them. She’s just had a very public fight with some nobleman who tried to get her to carry his belongings, and slipped away while an Antivan she’s never met danced in with a silver—but strangely barbed—tongue to deal with the problem.

She is not thinking much of Solas, if she is completely honest. She’s thinking of Emren and Veris, and what she must write to tell the Keeper, if these strange _shemlen_ who have her at their beck and cal will permit it. To tell their family. How strange, that she’s the one who survived, when she has no parents to mourn her loss.

“I feel I must apologize,” he starts with, and she jerks her head up in shock. She hadn’t heard him approach, his lightly-clad feet making little noise in the snow. She feels her cheeks warm with embarrassment—at her hiding place so easily discovered, at how _easily_ she is snuck up on. Some proud Dalish hunter she makes.

She stares up at him with wide eyes, and she can’t think of a single thing to say in response. He’s smiling down at her, and gone is the polite facade he wears around the others. She sees warmth in his eyes—reserved, yes, for there are years between their last meeting and this one. And she reads tension in his shoulders, in the hand he moves to take something gleaming from his pocket.

“I would have warned you myself if I had been there when you woke. Both times,” he adds, as an afterthought. “First, of what the _shemlen_ thought you had done, and then what they’ve decided you are.”

She allows his smile to lift her from her sorrows, just a little. She tries to smile back, and finds it feels strange on her face after so much death and the whirlwind of change brewing around her.

He holds out what he has taken from his pocket. It catches the sunlight, gleaming, and her cheeks burn as she recognises the halla pendant, intact, immaculate, shining.

“I thought,” she starts to say, the words startled from her. They trail off, uselessly, as she takes it from him with a delicate touch. Their hands brush, and his palm is warm on her cold fingertips.

He frowns at her touch, at the ice cold of her skin. “May I?” he asks, and she nods. He sits beside her, just far enough away to be respectful, and he takes her hands in his. They’re warm like a fire, large enough to encompass her own completely, and for a moment she forgets that she has witnessed nine summers since the one he stumbled upon her dunking Emren in the stream.

He breathes onto their hands, and she feels a tingle of warmth pass from him to her—with the shimmer in the air that speaks of magic, a spell so effortless she can’t even tell at first it’s being cast.

“Did you learn that in the Fade?” she teases, and he smiles.

“Perhaps,” he says, cryptically. He lowers his gaze, then, and releases her hands, as if he’s made some mistake. “I was... surprised to see you again, _lethallan_.”

She looks down at the chain twining in her fingers.

“Cassandra’s people took it as evidence of your wrongdoing,” he says, shifting away to a more respectable distance. “I must admit, I was surprised to find it still among your belongings.”

She holds it close to her heart. “It... means something to me.”

“Something?”

She breathes out. “I looked for you. At _Arlathvhen._ ”

He does not give her an answer immediately. When she turns back to him, his gaze has been drawn up, to what remains of the Breach, calm but pulsing in the sky.

“I could not be there,” he says, and she thinks there’s something so lonely about his expression that she does not press him on it.

“Well,” she says, a little more loudly than she means to, and it startles him from whatever dark thoughts he’s lost in. “I _am_ grateful you decided to show up here, at least. I don’t think this would all be as... _pleasant_ as it has been without a familiar face.”

He laughs, and she _remembers_ the sound, remembers what it stirred in her heart all those summers ago. “May I?” he asks, and she hands him the necklace. She reaches back and lifts her red hair for him, and she tries to ignore the heat in her cheeks as he leans in, holding one end of the necklace in each of his hands.

“I meant to ask about your hair,” he says. She feels the familiar warmth of the ancient spells that still linger on the thin chain as he slips it around her neck. “I remember it being very dark.”

“I dye it,” she tells him, the words feeling warm as they leave her lips. She remembers him telling her about this little piece of the past for the first time, remembers slipping it over her head once he’d fallen asleep.

His fingers brush the back of her neck as he does up the clasp. Time almost seems to slow down when she feels his breath on her ear, warm and certain—does he linger there, or is it her imagination? She almost expects him to take some strands between his fingers, to twist them in order to examine them closer.

“Embrium?” he guesses, pulling away, the air between them strangely warm, his voice slightly bashful.

She bites her lip to hide a smile.

“And?” she says, turning to meet his gaze.

She catches him with an odd expression, right before he schools it into passive friendliness once again—and her heart skips a beat, traitor that it is.

“The stamen from crystal grace,” he suggests, more certain of this.

“Keep going,” she says, finding herself leaning in, finding that she enjoys the gleam in his eyes when she does not give it away, does not simply tell him what he wants to know.

She has seen nine summers since she saw Solas last—hard summers, especially for a clan so involved with the humans, harbouring too many mages and too many angry youth. But she invites him again to speak of the Fade, of his dreams and what he has seen in them, and the conversation turns to easily to his worries, of the future of this Inquisition.

“How would you stop them?” he asks when she tries to reassure him.

It’s her turn to smile, to remember an Arcane Horror in the basement of a temple—a broken leg and desperate measures, a desperate leap from a position of only relative safety, to protect a stranger risking his life for hers.

“However I had to,” she answers him.

He only looks momentarily surprised—but his thoughts seem to follow the same trail as hers. His eyes dart down to her lips, so quickly as to be barely noticeable.

“That should not surprise me,” he says. “I suppose leaping onto the back of an _elgar’harel_ would be more frightening than an army of human fanatics?”

She laughs. “I’ll take demons any day,” she admits, and she tries to ignore the warmth in her chest which his laughter joins hers.

**Author's Note:**

> (shows up a million years late with Starbucks) Did anyone even still want this anymore?
> 
> Timeline inconsistencies with canon because Dalish at First Glance was written prior to Trespasser, and I thought Solas might have been wandering the world for a while. Apparently not? Explains a few things I guess.


End file.
